New user requirements and a steady demand for more capacity have created new test challenges across the optical network spectrum. These articles explore some of the more salient challenges as well as solutions, including the benefits of the right monitoring system, strategies for successful multi-fiber connectorization, and evolving data center test requirements.
The deadline for submissions for the 2020 Lightwave Innovation Reviews is this Friday, November 15. The Lightwave Innovation Reviews recognizes excellence in a product or technology applicable to optical networks. Information on the Reviews, including how to submit an entry, can be found at the Lightwave Innovation Reviews portal.
With anticipation building for autonomous vehicles, buzz around a hyperloop that can travel as fast as 800 miles an hour, and the growing presence of transportation devices that have an ability to communicate with each other, this article explores the way technology is changing the future of mobility. Throughout history, mobility has been an important driver for societal development: enabling economies to boom by facilitating faster, more reliable trade, higher standards of living, international investment, and larger globalized business operations. The future of transportation is set to deliver all these outcomes and more. As the world becomes increasingly connected, so do transportation assets and devices, empowering communities and citizens around the world.
A recent evergreen technical brief, authored by Corning Cable Systems and distributed by eAnixter, takes as its premise the reality that improper use of a cable re-spooler can cause damage to fiber-optic cable jackets or, in tight buffered cables, result in wavy fiber due to cable crossovers or excessive tensile loading. The document provides a recommended procedure for cutting and respooling fiber-optic cables.
Tomorrow’s challenges can only be solved with intelligent, networked buildings, so called smart buildings. Networking encompasses all parts of a building – from the electricity supply, taking account of regenerative energy (smart grid), via safety and security technology and operational regulation through interconnected building-automation systems, to control via mobile devices. The prerequisite for all this is systems interoperability, the only way network risks can be mastered.
Passwords are outdated and no longer adequate to protect a business’ IT infrastructure and data assets. To resolve this, companies must move towards more heightened security measures, such as using employees’ physical identities and biometric data to authenticate entry to corporate buildings, networks and devices. Once, gaining access to an organisation’s headquarters through hand or fingerprint scanning seemed like something only needed for top-secret offices such as MI5, or in Mission Impossible films. However, thanks to the increasing amount of data stored on company servers, it is becoming a necessity for most organisations to secure their offices and data centres.
Verdigris Technologies’ will bring machine-learning applications to ABB’s global line of connected low-voltage switching fabric products to predict unplanned surges in power consumption for commercial and industrial buildings. The electrical equipment, power, robotics and automation company is launching a new digital energy app-store and Verdigris’s AI technology is their first app.
Norway aims to modernize its rail network by 2034. While some lengths of track in Norwary are still operated manually, the goal is to transform the country’s entire rail network into a fully-digitalized, IP-based system — a genuine Internet of Things. In a ten-year timeframe Bane NOR will invest more than two billion euros in digitalizing and automating its rail network, as part of the company’s ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System) initiative. The objective is to establish a leading position for Norway in the use of digital technologies in the rail sector with the most advanced rail network in Europe.
Holder Construction broke ground Nov. 1 on a Google data center in New Albany, Ohio, making it the third major tech company to establish a facility in the Columbus, Ohio suburb. The new location will cost $600 million and cover 440 acres, with completion expected by early 2021. Google’s arrival follows Facebook adding 415 acres last month for the social media giant’s growing data farm in the town. Facebook first invested in a New Albany data center in 2017, three years after Amazon spent $1.1 billion on facilities in central Ohio.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) have provided opportunities for newer “smart plants” to replace stodgy, old manufacturing systems that aren’t worth rebuilding. Not so in Kentucky. Not so at Schneider Electric. The company welcomed more than 200 customers to the brownfield facility in Lexington, which produces electrical load centers, commonly known as breaker boxes, for residences. Thousands of units come off the lines every day, but the tour focused on EcoStruxure Solutions™, a Schneider Electric IIoT platform. The company not only sells it to customers, it uses it in its own 62-year-old plant, blending old technology with new technology.
